Journal of Cognition最新文献

When a speaker produces a pronoun, they must choose a form that carries the appropriate features. The current study investigates how speakers identify these features. We consider two possible routes: a conceptual-lexical route, whereby pronouns derive their features from the concept of the referent, and a syntactic route, whereby pronoun form is determined through a feature matching operation with the linguistic antecedent. We hypothesize that the use of these two routes should be differentially susceptible to interference from representations other than the pronoun's referent. We use agreement attraction to distinguish them. In two experiments, we test whether Spanish speakers produce number and grammatical gender attraction errors. We observe small but reliable attraction effects for both features, demonstrating that pronoun formulation can be disrupted by the linguistic representations of nearby nouns. These attraction effects suggest that speakers can use a syntactic route to pronoun form.

Decisional confidence refers to the subjective evaluation of the accuracy of a decision based on sensory information. While these judgments are typically grounded in the strength of evidence leading to a decision, they are also subjected to influence from top-down factors such as prior expectations. Previous research has highlighted the impact of prior information on decision parameters such as reaction times and decision criteria placement. However, a comprehensive understanding of how prior information shapes confidence ratings is still lacking. In this study, we manipulate prior knowledge by inducing varying levels of target probability expectation (low: 33%, random: 50%, high: 67%) in a perceptual detection task. In each trial both type-1 (detection) and type-2 (confidence) responses were recorded. First, we replicate previous findings, demonstrating that decisional priors impact decision criteria but not task sensitivity. Secondly, we reveal the strong effect that prior expectations exert on type-2 decisions, with this influence being moderated by a congruency effect between the given prior, the actual stimulus presented, and the provided response. Moreover, we find that confidence is higher in correct compared to incorrect responses, with low-probability trials leading to higher confidence judgments in correct choices compared to random and liberal trials. Finally, we unveil that prior-dependent modulation rates in criterion and confidence were positively associated. These results underscore the intricate interplay between prior expectations, decision-making, and confidence levels, demonstrating that what we perceive is not solely a data-driven phenomenon but can be already shaped by the available information about the state of the world.

Research on unconscious processing has been a valuable source of evidence in psycholinguistics for shedding light on the cognitive architecture of language. The automaticity of syntactic processing, in particular, has long been debated. One strategy to establish this automaticity involves detecting significant syntactic priming effects in tasks that limit conscious awareness of the stimuli. Criteria for assessing unconscious priming include the visibility (d') of masked words not differing significantly from zero and no positive correlation between visibility and priming. However, such outcomes could also arise for strictly methodological reasons, such as low statistical power in visibility tests or low reliability of dependent measures. In this study, we aimed to address these potential limitations. Through meta-analysis and Bayesian re-analysis, we find evidence of low statistical power and of participants having above-chance awareness of 'subliminal' words. Moreover, we conducted reliability analyses on a dataset from Berkovitch and Dehaene (2019), finding that low reliability in both syntactic priming and visibility tasks may better explain the absence of a significant correlation. Overall, these findings cast doubt on the validity of previous conclusions regarding the automaticity of syntactic processing based on masked priming effects. The results underscore the importance of revisiting the methods employed when exploring unconscious processing in future psycholinguistic research.

Many theories on cognitive effort start from the assumption that cognitive effort can be expended at will, and flexibly up- or down-regulated depending on expected task demand and rewards. However, while effort regulation has been investigated across a wide range of incentive conditions, few investigated the cost of effort regulation itself. Across four experiments, we studied the effects of reward expectancy and task difficulty on effort expenditure in a perceptual decision-making task (random-dot-motion) and a cognitive control task (colour-naming Stroop), and within each task comparted cues between short (cueing the next trial) and long (cueing the next six trials) prediction horizons. We found that participants used the cue information only when it was valid for multiple trials in a row. In the random-dot-motion task, a high reward expectancy resulted in better accuracy, especially in easy trials, but only with long prediction horizon. Similarly, in the Stroop task, the reward facilitation of reaction time was only observed after reward cues with a long prediction horizon. Together, our results indicate that people experience a cost to effort regulation, and that lower adjustment frequency can compensate for this cost.

Word norming datasets have become an important resource for psycholinguistic research, and they are based on the underlying assumption that individual differences are inconsequential to the measurement of semantic dimensions. In this pre-registered study we tested this assumption by examining whether individual differences in motor imagery are related to variance in semantic ratings. We collected graspability ratings (i.e., how easily a word's referent can be grasped using one hand) for 350 words and also had each participant complete a series of motor imagery questionnaires. Using linear mixed effect models we tested whether measures of motor imagery ability (e.g., the Florida Praxis Imagery Questionnaire and the Test of Ability in Movement Imagery for Hands) and motor imagery vividness (e.g., the Vividness of Movement Imagery Questionnaire 2) could account for variance (raw and absolute difference scores) in graspability ratings. We observed a significant relationship between motor imagery vividness and absolute rating difference scores, wherein people with more vivid motor imagery provided ratings that were further from the mean word ratings. However there was no relationship between motor imagery and raw rating difference scores. The results suggest that there are measurable systematic differences in how participants make sensorimotor semantic ratings, which has implications for how sensorimotor semantic word norms are used for investigations of lexical semantic processing.

People's understanding of topics and concepts such as risk, sustainability, and intelligence can be important for psychological researchers and policymakers alike. One underexplored way of accessing this information is to use free associations to map people's mental representations. In this tutorial, we describe how free association responses can be collected, processed, mapped, and compared across groups using the R package associatoR. We discuss study design choices and different approaches to uncovering the structure of mental representations using natural language processing, including the use of embeddings from large language models. We posit that free association analysis presents a powerful approach to revealing how people and machines represent key social and technological issues.

The dissociation between conscious and unconscious perception is one of the most relevant issues in the study of human cognition. While there is evidence suggesting that some stimuli might be unconsciously processed up to its meaning (e.g., high-level stimulus processing), some authors claim that most results on the processing of subliminal stimuli can be explained by a mixture of methodological artefacts and questionable assumptions about what can be considered non-conscious. Particularly, one of the most controversial topics involves the method by which the awareness of the stimuli is assessed. To address this question, we introduced an integrative approach to assess the extent to which masked hierarchical stimuli (i.e., global shapes composed of local elements) can be processed in the absence of awareness. We combined a priming task where participants had to report global or local shapes, with the use of subjective and objective awareness measures collected either in a separate block (offline), or trial-by-trial during the main task (online). The unconscious processing of the masked primes was then evaluated through two different novel model-based methods: a Bayesian and a General Recognition Theory modeling approach. Despite the high correlation between awareness measures, our results show that the use of alternative approaches based on different theoretical assumptions leads to diverging conclusions about the extent of the unconscious processing of the masked primes.

The question we addressed in the current study is whether the mere prospect of monetary reward gain affects subjective time perception. To test this question, we collected trial-based confidence reports in a task where participants made categorical decisions about probe durations relative to the reference duration. When there was a potential to gain a monetary reward, the duration was perceived to be longer than in the neutral condition. Confidence, which reflects the perceived probability of being correct, was higher in the reward gain condition than in the neutral condition. We found that confidence influences the sense of time in different participants. Participants with high confidence reported perceiving the duration signaled by the monetary gain condition longer than participants with low confidence. Our results showed that only high confidence individuals overestimated the context of monetary gain. Finally, we found a negative relationship between confidence and time perception, and that confidence bias at the maximum uncertainty duration of 450 ms is predictive of time perception. Taken together, the current study demonstrates that subjective measures of the confidence profile caused an overestimation of time rather than the outcome valence of reward expectancy.

This tutorial provides guidelines for conducting linear mixed effects (LME) analyses for simple designs, aimed at researchers familiar with t-tests, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and linear regression. First, we compare LME analyses with traditional methods when participants are the only source of random variation. We show that LME analysis is more interesting as soon as you have more than one observation per participant per condition. The second section discusses studies where both participants and stimuli are used as sources of random variation, ensuring robust generalization beyond the specific stimuli tested. In our search for standardized effect sizes, we saw that partial eta squared is even less informative for LME than for ANOVA. We present eta squared within as an alternative, to be used in combination with the traditional measure eta squared (also in ANOVA). To facilitate implementation, we analyze toy datasets with R and jamovi. This tutorial gives researchers a good foundation for LME analyses of simple 2 × 2 designs and paves the way for tackling more complicated designs.

Visual working memory and verbal storage are often investigated independently of one another. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that naming visual stimuli can provide an advantage in performance during visual working memory tasks. On the other hand, there is also evidence that labeling could lead to biases in recall. Here, we present an exploratory investigation of verbal labels associated with the memorization of simple visuo-spatial stimuli, and how the use of these labels informs recall behavior of the same stimuli in a separate working memory task. English-speaking participants performed a working memory task with orientation and location stimuli, followed by a separate naming task featuring the same stimuli. We found a diverse set of labels employed frequently and with a consistent distribution across stimulus types, the stimulus space, and among participants. The use of individual spatial words, predicted class 1 cardinal biases in memory (i.e. the observation that cardinal stimuli are more accurately recalled than non-cardinal ones). Conversely, words expressing uncertainty (e.g. 'slightly', 'near') predicted class 2 cardinal bias (i.e. recall biases away from the cardinal planes). This relationship between word use and recall biases is consistent with shared representational resources that are used for both visuo-spatial and verbal working memory.